


Mama Gideon

by centreoftheselights



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bickering, Canon-Typical Necromancy Metaphors, Crack Treated Seriously, Discussion of Harrow's sex life (or lack of it), Discussion of canon shitty childhoods, F/F, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Gideon Nav is in denial about the sexual tension between her and Harrow, Gideon and Harrow talk about their emotions much to their mutual horror, Gideon is (in her opinion) an excellent friend, Humour, Implied Morning Sickness, Magical Pregnancy, Mention of Necrophilia, Mention of alcohol, Necromancy-Induced Pregnancy, Post-Gideon the Ninth (Locked Tomb Trilogy), Pregnancy, Sharing a Bed, Sleepy Cuddles, Snark, Swearing, Unplanned Pregnancy, everyone lived AU, parenting fears, reassurance, this fic works on the rule of "in space no one knows or cares if you're trans"
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-02
Updated: 2021-01-09
Packaged: 2021-03-12 06:40:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,809
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28506105
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/centreoftheselights/pseuds/centreoftheselights
Summary: Harrow all but collapsed onto the bed next to her, burying her face in her hands.“Gideon. I'm pregnant.”Gideon blinked once. Twice.“Is that evenallowed?”
Relationships: Gideon Nav & Harrowhark Nonagesimus, Gideon Nav/Harrowhark Nonagesimus
Comments: 26
Kudos: 112





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This is just a silly idea I had that I wrote out as a warm-up exercise. I may continue it if inspiration strikes, I may leave it here.
> 
> Set in a vague post-Gideon the Ninth AU where everyone from Canaan House is still alive and in their own bodies and hanging out, somewhere, for some reason. Just don't think about it too hard.
> 
> Please no Book 2 spoilers in the comments, my copy is currently in transit to me.

Gideon woke up, groaned, threw her arm over her head, and groaned again, louder. Her head was pounding from a hangover, and the bright shaft of light through the window was absolutely not helping.

After a few seconds, she blinked and removed her arm. Normally by this point, Harrow would have told her to shut up, or kicked her with feet unnaturally cold and toenails unnaturally sharp. But the other side of the bed was empty, and for the third time this week, there were horrifically _organic_ noises coming from the bathroom.

Gideon dragged herself out from under the covers with a resentful shiver, and rapped her knuckles against the bathroom door.

“Harrow?” she called. “Are you dying? Has someone poisoned you? You can't tell me it's a hangover this time, you can't have had more than two drinks last night and even you aren't that much of a lightweight…”

From the other side of the door, there was a disgruntled noise which, unfortunately for Harrow, sounded more like a whimper than a scoff. The door swung open, revealing Harrow – her scowl still perfectly composed even as she looked pale and pinched, a trickle of bile running down her chin.

“Sit down,” she said. Gideon huffed and crossed her arms and then obeyed anyway, flopping down on the unmade bed with legs akimbo.

“ _What_?” she demanded.

Harrow bit her lip. “Don't freak out.”

Gideon sat bolt upright.

“ _What the fuck have you done_?”

“What did I just – it's _fine_ , Griddle, I know exactly what I'm doing –”

“ _Oh fuck_ _how_ _many people are_ _going to die –_ ”

“ARE YOU GOING TO LET ME TELL YOU OR NOT?”

Reluctantly, Gideon shut up, while continuing to try and communicate “if you have doomed us all I am going to be _very_ annoyed with you” with her eyebrows.

But to her surprise, Harrow all but collapsed onto the bed next to her, burying her face in her hands.

“Gideon. I'm _pregnant_.”

Gideon blinked once. Twice.

“Is that even _allowed_?”

Harrow scowled. “What do you mean, 'allowed'?”

Gideon made a broad gesture, attempting to encompass all of – well, everything about The Reverend Daughter Harrowhark Nonagesimus. Harrow looked like she had been carved from cold marble by a sculptor with a thing for emaciation and furrowed eyebrows. Gideon suspected she powered herself on nothing but fury and bone magic channelled into her own skeleton. Harrow was hostility and death given human form, and that was on a _good_ day.

Gideon admittedly had only a very vague concept of what the word “maternal” was supposed to mean, but she was pretty sure Harrow was it's exact polar opposite. Let alone a word like _fertile_ –

Gideon's train of thought was suddenly derailed as a second, far more horrific objection slammed into her mind like a ton of bricks.

“ _Who_?” she demanded, in tones of utter dread.

“What?”

“It can't have been your Locked Tomb cutie, you haven't been back to Ninth in almost a year…”

Harrow's eyes widened in understanding, then narrowed in fresh indignation.

“Griddle, for the last time, I have _not_ committed necrophilia!”

“Oh holy fuck, was it _Sextus_? Are you _sex pals_ with _Sex Pal_?”

Harrow gave her a look that could have withered the flesh off a corpse.

“Okay, no. But then, _who_?” Gideon demanded. “Who would possibly want to _make a_ _baby_ with you?”

“As much as I hate to validate your view of my social life –” Harrow sighed. “There was no-one else involved.”

Now Gideon was lost.

“You went to a bio-facility? But… when? Why didn't you tell me?”

“No, I – I told you, I've been working on a new theorem, with the aim of sustainable thalergy generation –”

These words vaguely bring back a number of recollections of Harrow talking at high speed using a lot of words Gideon had not even slightly understood. She had _tried_ to listen… kind of…

“And it worked, I solved it! Only… it didn't do exactly what I thought.”

“You necromancied yourself a baby?”

Harrow gave Gideon a look of pure, unfiltered disgust.

“Yes,” she said. “I cannot believe you are making me say it, but I necromancied myself a baby. Is that sufficient explanation? Can we move on now?”

Gideon bit her lip.

“Okay. Okay. You're pregnant with an accidental skele-spawn.” She tapped her foot on the ground a few times. “So. What are we going to do now?”

Harrow looked at Gideon, her eyes wide. Gideon looked back at Harrow.

No-one said the words “two hundred dead children,” but they hung in the air anyway.

“Right,” Gideon said after a moment. “So you're going to have a baby, and if anyone tries to stop you I am going to stick a sword in them.”

Harrow shot her a look of deep and profound gratitude, and for a moment Gideon felt warm and fuzzy and appreciated for the excellent badass cavalier she was.

So of course, then Harrow said:

“There's something else.”

Gideon drummed her fingers on her leg. “Yeah?”

“The theory – I'm not ready to announce my findings yet. I need to refine my work, write up my notes –”

“Get to the point, Nonagesimus.”

“No-one can know that this baby is because of my work,” Harrow said. “So I was hoping – you don't have to – but if you would –”

“You want me to pretend it's _mine_?” Gideon almost fell off the bed in shock.

“Well. Yes.”

“You want people to think that we're _fucking_?”

“'Want' is not the term I'd use, Griddle – look, will you do it, or not?”

“Well, yeah, of course. One flesh, one end, yada yada. If you want, I will be your baby mama.”

Gideon fell back against the bedsheets, staring up at the ceiling.

“But just so you know,” she said. “No-one is going to believe we slept together.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My copy of HtN arrived today! Depending on how the weekend goes I might post one more chapter before finding out how jossed this all is.

“It's about time.”

Gideon frowned at Cam across the weights rack. Harrow was holed up in her lab trying to create a cure for morning sickness, and was therefore under no threat from anyone except herself, which was definitely above Gideon's pay grade. So she was in the gym, and Camilla was training too, and it had seemed as good a time as any.

“Are you sure you heard me right?” she said. “I just said Harrow and I _did the do_. Danced the horizontal tango. Took the express train to pound town. I'd say 'buried the bone' but with our social circle that's just another Tuesday –”

Cam made a soft grunting noise, although that might have been from the shoulder presses she was doing.

“For someone who got laid last night, you don't seem very happy about it.”

“It wasn't last night.”

At that, Camilla scoffed.

“What?” Gideon demanded.

“It isn't like you,” Cam said, “to show restraint when telling me about your personal life.”

“Fuck off,” Gideon snapped. “It was – a few weeks ago. I can be discreet about things.”

“But only up to a point.” Cam raised an eyebrow. “Okay. You and Nonagesimus finally worked out your unbearable sexual tension. So, do you want me to throw you a party or something?”

“I have a point, I'm getting to the point, if you'd just let me –” Gideon took a deep breath. “She's preggers.”

There was silence. Gideon started counting bicep curls – one, two, three –

“… Why,” Cam asked, “would you decide to do that?”

“It wasn't on purpose!”

Cam froze, dropping her dumbbells, and turned to stare at Gideon.

“Even you,” she said, in tones that could cut steel, “are not _that_ careless.”

“I –”

Gideon's protest died in her throat as she remembered that in the narrative she had thus far established? She absolutely was.

“… I guess I am,” she said.

“Have you received a head trauma lately?” Cam demanded. “That would explain why you seem to have forgotten how to go about _basic tasks_ like _providing your necromancer with_ _essential_ _medical care_ –”

“Ah. No, no! Harrow – _We_ – are going to uh. Continue with the pregnancy, for the duration.”

Camilla looked at Gideon like she'd grown a second head.

“And you _want_ that?”

At this, Gideon's spine straightened.

“It's important,” she said firmly. “To Harrow.”

At that, Cam softened, or at least stopped looking like she might imminently attempt to stab Gideon. For a second, Gideon thought she saw something a little like pity in Cam's gaze.

She looked away.

“Anyway, you know what Harrow is like. She'll be fine! She's in her lab trying to cook up the cure for morning sickness already –”

There was a clunking sound as Cam put her weights back on the rack.

“I have to go,” she said bluntly, and then she turned on her heel and left.

“… 'Congratulations' might have been nice,” Gideon grumbled to the empty gym.

#

“Congratulations!” trilled Dulcinea as Palamedes wheeled her chair into Gideon and Harrow's room.

Harrow regarded the two of them with the kind of look a normal person would give to a dead mouse, which was generally how she greeted her close friends.

“What are you two doing here?” she snarled. (Her experiments in the lab earlier had been less than successful, which Gideon knew because she had returned late and hadn't tried to bore Gideon with technobabble about her latest miraculous achievement.)

(Given how the last miraculous achievement had gone, Gideon was glad of that.)

“A little birdie told us that you're expecting!” Dulcinea's beam always seemed to increase in power proportionate to Harrow's gloom, and today it was on full wattage. “So we came to offer our moral support –”

“Cam mentioned you've been having trouble with morning sickness?” Palamedes laid a hand on Harrow's forehead. “I have a tea you could try, and some vitamins –”

“Get your hand off me, Sextus.” Harrow's voice was icy, but the fact she hadn't cursed him yet spoke volumes. “Griddle, did you even wait two minutes before telling everyone on the station?”

“I told _one_ person,” Gideon snapped. “And you didn't say _anything_ about keeping it a secret.”

“I don't know how anyone ever believed you were a cultist of the Ninth –”

“I thought you _wanted_ me to tell people! You hate talking to people!”

“I can send you some information about dealing with stress, if you'd like,” Sextus volunteered, and Gideon remembered they had witnesses. Dulcinea was smirking at them as though this was all a performance for her benefit.

“I am not _stressed_ ,” Harrow snarled at him. “And I can deal with a _minor_ physical symptom without your help.”

“Forgive me,” Palamedes shot back. “I didn't know you'd become a medical expert overnight.”

While Harrow began to snarl something back at him, Gideon moved away from the bickering pair and perched herself on the arm of Dulcinea's chair – a pose that achieved maximum devil-may-care posturing while being careful to still support her own weight.

“I'm so happy for you two,” Dulcinea said, her eyes shining bright as she took Gideon's hand. “I always knew you'd work something out together.”

Gideon abruptly attempted to school her face into however a newly-happily-dating-someone person was supposed to look at her former-crush-who-got-suddenly-engaged-to-the-world's-biggest-nerd-after-three-weeks-of-friendly-flirtation. Since she didn't have the faintest idea what look that was supposed to be, her next answer was rather vague.

“Yeah…”

Dulcinea patted her hand kindly, giving her the kind of look that never failed to make Gideon feel as transparent as a glass of water.

“And of course, Pal and I couldn't be happier for you both,” she continued, “even if you aren't doing things entirely the usual way. If there's anything either of you need – for yourselves or for the baby –”

Dulcinea kept talking, but Gideon could no longer hear over the sound of all her blood roaring in her ears as she only narrowly succeeded in not passing out.

Because it had just hit her, in that moment, that she was going to have a baby.

 _Fuck_.


	3. Chapter 3

After the others left, Gideon lay down almost immediately, not even bothering to change her clothes. After her and Harrow's awkward reconciliation, it had seemed obvious to start sharing the large bed in Harrow's quarters – it was easily large enough for them both and a number of other people besides, and Gideon would rather have died than slept on the cav-protocol cot while Harrow lazed in luxury. And if, every once in a while, one of them would wake from a nightmare to reach out into the darkness and take the other's hand… well, what happened under the covers stayed under the covers.

So Gideon flopped down against the pillows, and stared up at the gauzy black curtains as she waited for Harrow to finish scrubbing off her face paint in the bathroom, lie down, and turn off the light.

“Harrow,” Gideon said, three seconds after the darkness fell.

Harrow groaned quietly, and turned away from her.

“Harrow, seriously. What are we going to do with a baby?”

“I believe you're supposed to feed them. Possibly wash them occasionally.”

“You're not even twenty yet! We're not ready to be parents! The only thing either of us has ever kept alive is a skeleton!”

“Twenty-two skeletons is my record, actually.”

“I'm serious, Nonagesimus! We could get this _so_ wrong. What if we have a kid, and all we do is fuck her up?”

“You mean, what if she ends up like _us_?”

Harrow turned onto her back, so that Gideon could see her face in profile – even paler than she normally looked, quivering slightly.

“Well, I don't know if I'd go that far…” Gideon tried to joke, but it fell flat.

Harrow took a run of deep breaths, like she was trying to build herself up for something.

“Grid – _Gideon_.” She turned on her side, propping herself up on one elbow to look at Gideon with a face of grim resolve. “I don't want my child to grow up on the Ninth.”

“Well, yeah, no shit.”

Harrow scowled, but Gideon – a connoisseur of the many disgusted expressions of Harrow Nonagesimus – could tell she was less angry than she was trying to seem.

“I'm serious! I don't care – even if it means she's not a necromancer at _all_. I don't want her to grow up the way we did.”

“Nor do I!” Gideon shook her head. “Fuck, Harrow, if you wanted to pick an argument, you should have told me you _wanted_ to go back.”

“But –” Harrow sighed. “My whole purpose. The _point_ of my _creation_ , of – of _everything_ my parents did – was to continue the Ninth House. And I'm telling you I want to turn my back on all of it, that I want to make it so it's worth _nothing_ –”

“Harrow.” Gideon impulsively grabbed both of her hands, and for a moment Harrow tensed – but then she relaxed, no longer shaking. “You don't owe them _shit_.”

To Gideon's surprise, Harrow burst into tears. They rolled down her face, shining like drops of starlight in the low glow of the moons through the window. Harrow made no move to wipe them or pull away, and Gideon simply watched, transfixed.

“I don't know what to _do_ ,” Harrow whispered, as though it was the deepest, darkest secret of her soul.

Perhaps it was.

“Come here,” Gideon said brusquely, wrapping Harrow into a hug before she had a chance to pull away – although she didn't try to. It was awkward, and bony, as all Harrow-hugs were, but it felt right. Harrow hid her tears against Gideon's chest, and Gideon rubbed a hand on her back and started to do what she did best: talk bullshit.

“You're gonna have a kid,” she murmured. “You're gonna have her here, and all of our friends are gonna be here to help. Dulcinea will take her for rides on her chair and Cam will give her piggy back rides and Jeannemary and Isaac will babysit and she'll pull faces at Silas when he walks by. I'll teach her how to fight dirty and you'll try to convince me that three years old is a reasonable age to start learning bone magic –”

“It is,” Harrow interrupted.

“And we'll keep her fed and clean and all that other stuff, and we'll play games with her, and we'll tell her we love her. And if anyone ever hurts her, they will die a horrible, gruesome, painful death. Sound like a plan?”

“Nothing about that amounts to an actual plan,” Harrow groused.

“But are you _in?_ ” Gideon prodded her.

“Get off – yes, okay! Yes, that sounds good.” Harrow sighed, and shifted slightly so her head was pillowed on Gideon's chest. “Now we just have to make it happen.”

“We are great at making things happen,” Gideon said. “We make everything happen.”

Harrow didn't respond. She showed no sign of moving off of Gideon. In fact, Gideon was beginning to suspect she had fallen asleep.

Okay, so this was a thing they did now? Gideon could cope with that.


End file.
